Not all who wander are lost: wanderlust as a psychological driver of international mobility and migration

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Humankind has never been more mobile than today. As of 2013 there are more than 4 million students studying abroad - a figure which is expected to rise to 7 million by 2025. According to the limited scientific literature on the psychological underpinnings of such mobility, the majority of these students are neither pushed out of their countries by economic or political forces, nor primarily motivated by strategic career decisions, CV enhancement or academic considerations. However, in the absence of these factors, it is unclear what the main impetus of said mobility is. To answer that question, I propose the introduction of a hitherto overlooked psychological construct: wanderlust. Thereby, I conceptualise wanderlust as a basic personality trait with an emotional state component, that entails a strong motivational outward drive and manifests itself in elevated intended and actual mobility. Across three working packages my PhD sets out to (1)develop a psychometrically sound, extensively validated quantitive wanderlust measure, (2) elucidate the motivational force of wanderlust as a driver of student mobility and link its functioning and underlying processes to prominent frameworks in motivation psychology, such as the satiation cycle and the principle of motivational plasticity, (3) trace back the historical origins of wanderlust in a North American large-scale sample via instrumental variable analysis and relate them to contemporary economic, political and social outcomes.